In the end, the new sonic smorgasbord again failed to thrill Drake, who mumbled the most veiled of criticisms to his one public interrogator, Jerry Gilbert: ‘We started doing [Bryter Layter] almost a year ago. But I’m not altogether clear about this album – I haven’t got to terms with the whole presentation.’ He made much the same ill-expressed point to David Sandison who, as an Island insider, knew something of the circumstances involved in making the album: ‘At the time . . . I got the impression from Nick that he didn’t like the strings, or the way the album was presented . . . [Yet] Bryter Layter took a year to make because Nick Drake spent that long making damn sure it was precisely the way he wanted it.’
Like Barrett, Drake was the kind of artist who, even when unconvinced by what a musical overseer-cum-producer was doing to his songs, kept his thoughts largely to himself. It left Boyd to interpret the most intangible of clues. Because whatever Drake thought of Joe as a producer, he was still to a large extent in awe of the person himself. (Anthea Joseph again called it right when observing: ‘He was emotionally tied to Joe, it was a mental thing.’) Only when the album was done did he finally ‘confront’ Boyd.
So what was his problem? According to Boyd: ‘He felt that it was too arranged, too produced, too many other personalities.’ This, though, was precisely Boyd’s forte. As arranger Kirby pointed out shortly before his death, the man ‘was more of a facilitator [than a] producer. He would put the deals together and then get various inspired combinations of musicians to make up the terrific range on the [Witchseason] albums.’
One ‘inspired combination’ Boyd brought about during the Bryter Layter sessions did provide Drake with the musical context he’d always craved. Welsh-born Velvet Underground founder John Cale – who was back in Britain formulating the sound for his own baroque rock symphony, Paris 1919 – was both an arranger and a fine songwriter in his own right, classically trained (under Aaron Copeland, no less), and demonstrably capable of bringing out strange fruit in artists as diverse as Nico, The Modern Lovers and The Stooges. The two songs Cale now arranged for Drake – ‘Northern Sky’ and ‘Fly’ – were the product of a single brainstorming session; Boyd’s description of the pair arriving at the studio the next morning, ‘John with a wild look in his eyes and Nick trailing behind’, perfectly capturing the nature of these contradistinct personalities.
The ever-eclectic Cale proceeded to play viola, harpsichord, celeste, piano and organ, while the ever-dependable Pegg plucked away on his bass. And, for once, Drake rose to the challenge of a great arranger, delivering in ‘Northern Sky’ perhaps his finest vocal performance; as Cale’s uplifting arrangement vies for dominion over the atypically downbeat Drake lyric: ‘Would you love me through the winter? / Would you love me till I’m dead? / Oh, if you would and you could / Come blow your horn on high.’17 But Cale found his experience of working with ‘the genius musician’ (as he later described him) no more edifying than previous nominees, telling Nick Kent in 1975, ‘You couldn’t talk to him. He was like a zombie, like he just had no personality left.’
The exquisite high of ‘Northern Sky’ was an impossible act to follow, and Drake didn’t really try. The low-key instrumental ‘Sunday’ would be its solitary successor and album coda – one of three instrumental with which Drake bookended his latest ten-song collection (the other two, ‘Introduction’ and the title track, would open each side). Boyd told American collector Frank Kornelussen, when co-compiling the posthumous Time of No Reply LP, ‘Nick was reluctant to introduce other songs to the Bryter Layter sessions for fear [I] might choose a vocal performance in place of any of the three instrumental, of which Nick was very proud.’ But that may well not be the whole truth and nothing but. Given the problem Drake was having summoning up single sentences in conversation – and as Linda Thompson says, by now he ‘made monosyllabic seem quite chatty’ – it seems highly likely he was experiencing similar difficulties with the lyrics he once pored over.
Whether Drake sensed it or not, the songs were starting to dry up – just three years after he first found his muse. Because he had made the fateful decision not to return to any of the songs he had accumulated in the long lead-up to Five Leaves Left – even ‘Things Behind the Sun’, which Boyd pushed him continually to record – Drake placed an unnecessary burden across his own back. As engineer John Wood recalls, ‘He [simply] didn’t have the [Bryter Layter] material ready, for unlike Five Leaves Left he was actually still writing for this album.’ ‘Northern Sky’ may be where it is on the album, the penultimate spot, because it was the last song he penned. Certainly if it was written in Hampshire while staying with the Martyns, as Beverley has indicated, then the song dates from the summer of 1970, by which time he was fast disappearing into an interior world. And for one of the Martyns it was quite a shock:
John Martyn: When I first met [Nick] he was rather more urbane than he became. He was always charming, delicately witty. But he just became more and more withdrawn . . . He just slipped and slipped further and further away into himself and divorced himself from the mundane. It [was] very sad, really.
It was only now that those who had always been closest to Drake began to sense that their boy was not so much introspective as almost cataleptic. For his parents, far removed from the hurly burly of London in pastoral Henley-in-Arden, their physical distance was as nothing to the growing chasm between their son and the world at large. According to his mother, Molly, it had been – at least in the beginning – a conscious choice: ‘He took this room [in Hampstead], all alone, and he decided to cut off from all his friends and that he was just going to concentrate on music.’ His father was left nonplussed: ‘[Once] he shut himself off in this room . . . it was rather difficult to get at him.’ Those who could still get to London easily, such as college friend Brian Wells, ‘would go and see him, [but] by then he’d become odd’. Drake could have been one of Laing’s case studies, as Barrett almost was. He was shutting down from within, a paradigm for the divided self that Laing previously identified in that controversial work:
The [divided] individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question . . . He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body . . . Such an individual, for whom the elements of the world . . . have a different hierarchy of significance from that of the ordinary person, is beginning, as we say, to ‘live in a world of his own’ . . . It is not true to say, however . . . that he is losing ‘contact with’ reality and withdrawing into himself. External events no longer affect him in the same way as they do others: it is not that they affect him less; on the contrary, frequently they affect him more . . . It may however, be that the world of his experience comes to be one he can no longer share with other people . . . It is lonely and painful to be always misunderstood, but there is at least from this point of view a measure of safety in isolation . . . He maintain[s] himself in isolated detachment from the world for months, living alone in a single room . . . But in doing this, he [begins] to feel he [is] dying inside . . . [so] he emerge[s] into social life for a brief foray in order to get a ‘dose’ of other people, but ‘not an overdose’ . . . [before] withdraw[ing] again into his own isolation in a confusion of frightened hopelessness.
If by the end of 1970 Drake was cutting himself off from the world that lay outside his music, he was evidently intent on reflecting this shift in the music itself. He told Jerry Gilbert that he planned to make his third album a solo album in the true sense: ‘For the next one I [like] the idea of just doing something with John Wood, the engineer at Sound Techniques.’ He had already told Joe Boyd as much as the producer was preparing to pack his bags and take off for a job with Warners in L.A.: ‘The next record is just going to be me and guitar.’ Until now he ha
d gone along with Boyd’s way of making him a household name. It was increasingly clear it wasn’t working. And though he failed to articulate his feelings to Boyd at this crucial juncture, when it might have made a difference, Drake felt let down.
He did, however, voice his disenchantment to three friends: Robert Kirby Paul Wheeler and Brian Wells. Wheeler was surprised to find his friend even thought in terms of commercial success (‘I didn’t think he was in it for that’); while Wells, having sat and listened to the whole of Bryter Layter in Drake’s presence, felt constrained to comment: ‘Well, if I’d made a record like that and it hadn’t sold I’d have been in the pits.’ Drake muttered back, ‘Now you see.’ Kirby, still slightly in awe of his fellow musician, noticed that ‘after Bryter Layter bombed, it [became] apparent that all was not well’. He even came to believe that, such was his friend’s disenchantment, he ‘stopped writing for a while’. Meanwhile, Drake’s bright and beautiful sister, who had her own upward career trajectory to consider, couldn’t see why her brother’s music was not selling and determined to find out why his record company was failing him. She was in for a surprise:
Gabrielle Drake: I think the crux came around the time he produced Bryter Layter . . . I rang up Island because we thought he was deeply depressed at that time because Island weren’t supporting him, that he’d brought out a record, and they’d never give him dates and things like that . . . They said, ‘We’d do anything for Nick, give him publicity, but he won’t do [any of] it.’ . . . I suddenly realized that . . . [here] was not where the problem lay.
The sister began to fear for her brother’s state of mind but felt powerless to intervene, while Nick continued to drift downward, invisible to the world he had once hoped to impress in song.
*
Meanwhile, another cracked actor feared for the very future of his own troubled sibling; and was equally fearful of whether he, too, might succumb to the schizophrenia that threatened to consume his entire family. Like Gabrielle Drake, David Bowie had tried his best to help his (half-)brother, Terry, but by the winter of 1971 he had come to feel the familial bonds tying him to his schizoid sibling were holding him down, too. Although Terry had not been definitively diagnosed with schizophrenia until 1969, the signs had been there for some time. Indeed, to brother David’s mind, he was simply living out the family curse. Some ten years older than his half-brother, Terry was thirteen when his aunt Una was interned at Park Prewett, a Victorian asylum near Basingstoke, where she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and given electro-shock treatment. By April 1957, she was dead (from cancer, though some in the family seemed convinced she took her own life). When David’s cousin Kristina was temporarily housed with his family, as her mother slowly succumbed to the familial disturbance of the mind, it seemed to the young David a question not of if, but when:
David Bowie: It scared me that my own sanity was in question at times, but on the other hand I found it fascinating that my family had this streak of insanity . . . [Terry] was manic depressive and schizophrenic. I often wondered at the time how near the line I was going and how far I should push myself. I thought that it would be serving my mental health better if I was aware that insanity was a real possibility in my life . . . [] . . . It had tragically afflicted particularly my mother’s side of the family . . . There were far too many suicides for my liking – and that was something I was terribly fearful of. I think it really made itself some kind of weight I felt I was carrying. [1993]
That weight was something Bowie liked to turn to his advantage. Tony Zanetta, Main Man Records employee turned memoir-writer, recalled how in the Ziggy years ‘the genetic madness that lurked in his family was a theme to which he turned whenever his life seemed out of control, or he made mistakes that he did not wish to acknowledge. It could be used to explain anything.’ He also had a certain a tendency to place himself at the centre of a psychodrama, family or otherwise, though in real life he preferred to be ever the observer, one step removed from others’ meltdowns.
Thus, by the time the BBC broadcast their exhaustive 1993 overview of his career. Bowie was vividly describing his brother in the throes of a psychotic episode on the way home from a a February 1967 Cream concert they’d attended in Bromley. As he tells it, Terry: ‘collapsed on the ground and he said the ground was opening up and there was fire and stuff pouring out of the pavement, and I could almost see it for him, because he was explaining it so articulately.’ It is an enticing description, were it not for its distinct similarity to the account from Terry’s own lips of his first psychotic episode outside Chislehurst Caves, reproduced in the Gillmans’ Alias David Bowie seven years before Bowie gave his version, which led to him sleeping rough for eight days before turning up at his mother’s house, just as David was making one of his rare visits:
Terry Burns: I heard a voice saying to me, ‘Terry, Terry,’ and I looked up and there was this great light and this beautiful figure of Christ looking down at me, and he said to me, ‘Terry, I’ve chosen you to go out into the world and do some work for me.’ He said, ‘I’ve picked you out.’ And the light of his face was so intense that I fell to the ground. I was on my stomach resting on my hands looking down and when I looked around me there was this big burning, a big ring of fire all around me, and the heat was intense, it was terrible. And then it all disappeared.
In Terry’s version, though, his brother was nowhere to be seen, and Bowie’s version – which seems to have been accepted at face value by just about every Bowie author since its 1993 appearance, despite its belated, somewhat suspicious appearance after Terry’s death – raises its own sorts of questions. Though he doubtless did hear about this and other such episodes from family members, and perhaps from Terry himself, Bowie had by the time of the episode fled his mother’s coop and was ensconced at Ken Pitt’s place. He was almost certainly in denial about his brother’s true mental state for some time (he made no mention of it to Pitt in those early months). Indeed, if his realisation of the true state of his brother’s schizophrenia coincided with its appearance as subject-matter in his songs, these only stated to appear early in 1969 with songs such as ‘Janine’ and ‘Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed’, the latter a whimsical precursor to ‘All the Madmen’.
Both songs would remain in the set through February 1970, when Bowie debuted the first song he intended for The Man Who Sold the World, ‘The Width of a Circle’ (which in its complete form would include the couplet, ‘He struck the ground, a cavern appeared / And I smelt the burning pit of fear’, a seeming reference to the Chislehurst Cave incident or something like it). If Bowie did witness a similar episode after going to see a Cream show in London, it seems doubtful that he would have let it gestate so long before coming out in song. In fact, only the band’s farewell performance at the Albert Hall on 26 November 1968 really fits this timeline.
Something certainly provided a tipping point in Bowie’s songwriting. Pre-1969, allusions to his family’s predisposition are non-existent; whereas Terry’s breakdown became the perennial backdrop to his work in the period 1969–70, when he started to write the kind of songs that made him the iconoclast most likely to. At the same time he became (almost simultaneously) involved in relationships with two women who remember constant references to the family curse. Mary Finnegan, for much of this period both landlady and lover, believed it was ‘the fact of Terry . . . which explained his refusal to take LSD, for the drug was suspected . . . of inducing . . . schizophrenia’. And then when Bowie met the refreshingly hedonistic Angie Barnett, some time around April 1969, he couldn’t wait to bring up the rattling skeleton in his family’s cranial closet:
Angie Bowie: David told me how he worshipped Terry, and how Terry had been such a big influence on him, introducing him to music, politics and poetry – and also to a haunting fear . . . Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic . . . Terry was in a mental ward, as David revealed himself to me that [first] night in Beckenham, confessing to an awful dread that he might follow his half-brother’s pa
th. It was an especially frightening prospect, he told me, because Terry was in fact one of several people in his mother’s family who had become unhinged. David said that sometimes when he got drunk or stoned, he could almost feel the family madness in him.
One further clue that Bowie had consciously placed himself on that tightrope separating sanity from insanity throughout the period leading up to the writing and recording of The Man Who Sold the World (TMWSTW) – only to then disown the album for the next decade – comes from an intentionally flippant comment he made to a Creem interviewer in October 1971, on the verge of starting Ziggy Stardust: ‘There was nothing ambitious about The Man Who Sold the World, except maybe the ambition to crawl out of a cave.’ That cave, one suspects, had a name.
There was also a more immediate reason why Terry remained on David’s mind throughout the six months it took to create TMWSTW. Bowie’s now-wife Angie had taken pity on the forlorn figure, no longer welcome in his mother’s home, and took her husband at his word when he said that ‘he worshipped Terry’. As such, she brought Terry temporarily into the Bowie household as shelter from the storm now raging inside his head, inviting him to stay at Haddon Hall ‘for up to four weeks at a time’. Hence why, when photographer Ray Stevenson called at the hall, Bowie’s closest musical associate, producer/bassist Tony Visconti, told him ‘not to make jokes about “loonies”.’ The reality of living with a schizophrenic, though, ultimately proved too wearing for the would-be wunder-kind and his wife, who were forced to recognize that Terry’s madness was real and that Cane Hill was the only place for him.
All the Madmen Page 14
